10 Tips for How to Create Successful Social Media Campaigns

Thanks to social media marketing, for a small business or digital marketing professional, that’s 3.03 billion potential customers!

It’s not totally realistic, of course, (unless you’re Kylie Jenner, maybe??) to wrangle every social media user–but a really well-crafted social media campaign can certainly help you pull a good chunk of those users.

Establishing successful social media campaigns is hard; you can put out loads of good content without seeing much result. The fact is, social media marketing is all about strategy–here’s how you can develop one that’ll draw in loads of active users!

1. Establish a Voice

Remember that social media is supposed to be…well…social! Your audience is hoping to have fun on their social media apps. Who are you to take that away from them?

When establishing your social media presence, it’s totally necessary for you to build a unique brand and voice that serves to connect with your audience. They’re not on Instagram to read a selection from a legal contract, and they’re not on Twitter to read yet another generic marketing technique.

Take the time to establish your company’s voice in a way that makes readers excited when they see you’ve posted new content.

2. Plan Ahead

Every other social media strategy will be made ten million times easier to implement and maintain if your social media strategy is one you take the time to carefully plan ahead of time.

Toss out whatever ideas you have of social media from your aunt’s every-hour Facebook posts or that 2 AM Instagram selfie you managed to pull 18 likes on. Social media, when done right, is not a spur-of-the-moment game. It’s about strategy, planning, and thoughtfulness.

If you care about having a killer social media game, you’ll take the time to plan your posting schedule and content mixture, adjusting and reevaluating all the while.

3. Strike a Balance

You know that one girl from your high school who only ever posts the same selfie of half her face with her lips pursed? The one whose captions are never anything but Drake lyrics? If your team hopes to manage a successful social media campaign…don’t be that girl.

It’s really important that your social media campaign is composed of more than just promotional content, for several reasons.

First, of course, because, if all your accounts ever post is promotional material, your audience will get tired of you and unfollow your accounts altogether. Second, because of the way many social media algorithms are set up, a steady stream of purely promotional content will totally knock you out of the game.

4. Know Your Audience

One of the most basic, but perhaps the very most important element of a successful social media campaign, is understanding the audience you’re marketing to.

Take advantage of social media analytics to get to know the details about your audience–where they live, what languages they speak, how they interact with your content–and then consider building audience personas to test your marketing against.

Remember never to make any assumptions when it comes to your audience. You may be surprised by your demographics or the ways in which your followers interact with your content–super important things to note when improving your social media outreach.

5. Know Your Competition

Next to knowing your own audience is understanding what (or who) it is that’s detracting from your campaign and business. Chances are, your competitors are already using social media, too! They may even have some good strategy that’ll help your game.

Think about conducting a competitive analysis to help reveal any shortcomings or opportunities within your industry’s social media campaigns. You might find a super important tip, like, although your audience is primarily 18 to 35, your major competition hasn’t even begun to build a presence on Instagram!

Understanding your competition and how the market impacts them and their social media strategy is a great way to help your team plan and reevaluate its own campaign.

6. Keep Track of Metrics

It’s important to set goals for your social media marketing plan, and in order to track those goals, it’s important to keep track of your operation’s overall metrics.

Pay attention to things like “likes” and retweets, but also keep in mind other meaningful metrics like leads generated, referrals, and conversion rates.

Understanding these deeper aspects of your social media campaign is a great way to stay on top of things and to always be aware when something isn’t working or needs to be switched up.

7. Fine Tune Your Strategy

We’re lucky enough to live in a world of marketing where there are several very different social media platforms to take advantage of. This helps you to reach a wider stretch of your market, and offers you opportunities to try out all kinds of techniques.

That said, however, if you’re looking to run a really successful social media campaign, it’s super important that you strategize and plan for every platform separately.

Social media posting isn’t a one-size-fits-all sort of game; your audience expects different things from different platforms. Take the time to thoughtfully cater to each platform individually to satisfy readers in each context.

8. Keep Up with the Trends

Remember, we’re putting aside whatever values you carry for your own social media presence here. Maybe your own accounts never show evidence of current trends. But your company’s accounts should.

Keeping up with current social media trends is super important–whether it’s a certain style of tweet or meme, keeping up on Instagram stories, or going live for an afternoon, you’ll want to keep up with the current social media trends that are important to your audience.

Sticking to the trendy content your readers are after can help establish your brand as more relevant in readers’ minds.

9. Understand Your Efforts

Once you’ve worked to get to know your audience and competition, as well as to track an understand your social media campaign’s metrics, you’ll need to step back and reevaluate your campaign as a whole.

It’s important, of course, to recognize whether or not certain things in your campaign are or aren’t working, but it’s also super necessary to understand things like “How does our campaign fit in with competitors’?”, “What’s working, what isn’t?”, “How can we accomplish more?” and so on.

Taking the time to understand the specifics of every aspect of your campaign will allow you to reevaluate and work out the wrinkles far more easily.

10. Have Fun With It!

Again–social media is about being social and having fun, connecting with followers along the way.

The only real way to ensure your social media campaign is killer is to have fun with the process! Readers can tell when there’s no excitement behind your posts. Routine promotional social media material is annoying and a total drag. If you’re not having fun with it, your audience isn’t either.

Perhaps above all else, always remember to be unique, personable, and fun.